Pre-tax treatment employees share medical insurance premiums

[artp]

Employee excludes his 25 % share of medical insurance premiums under company qualified plan.  He will be retiring later this year.  Under company plan the employer will continue to pay 75% and the employee pays 25% after retirement.  Employee wants to pay the balance of his entire share of this year's premium on a pre-tax basis. He also wants to pay all of his share of next years premiums on a pre-tax basis before he retires in 2017. I have never head of anyone trying to do this.  Has anyone run across this before? Your thoughts?

Art

[jklcpa]

I have never had anyone try this, and I haven't researched this.  My knee-jerk reaction is that this probably isn't allowed since these plans generally follow along with the rules that the medical expenses paid by these plans that allow pre-tax pay'ts via salary reduction have to be deductible medical expenses under the tax laws.  Following through with that thought, this should disallow prepaid medical expenses for future care that aren't associated with a long-term care policy or plan.  I don't know if there are any special provisions though that may be allowed if this is under a noncommercial, self-funded medical plan that the employer maintains though.  

Sorry, no definitive answer, just my ramblings from a very tired brain so don't take this as fact.  Give it 5 minutes and someone will say I'm wrong.  ~sigh~

What does the HR dept or plan administrator say?

[Cathy]

That is definitely an HR/Plan Administrator question.  You work off of W-2's unless you know one is wrong....yuck....you probably do need to know the answer to that one IF they let him do it....